It is known that upon color development of silver halide color photographic materials, the oxidation products of aromatic primary amine color developing agents react with couplers to form indophenol, indoaniline, indamine, azomethine, phenoxazine, phenazine and similar dyes, thereby forming color images. In this system, color reproduction is usually accomplished by the subtractive color process, i.e., silver halide emulsions selectively sensitive to blue, green and red, and yellow, magenta and cyan color couplers in a complementary relation therewith are used.
It is also heretofore known that couplers can be employed not only for forming dye images but also for the purpose of releasing photographically useful compounds. One example of couplers capable of releasing a photographically useful compound is a DIR coupler. The photographic functions of these couplers are described in T. H. James, The Theory of the Photographic Process, 4th Edition. pages 610 to 611 and page 343 (The Macmillan Co., New York, 1977), etc. More specifically, DIR couplers are employed in order to improve sharpness, graininess or color reproducibility. Examples of newly developed DIR couplers include the compounds as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,248,962, 4,409,323, 4,421,845 and 4,477,563, etc.
5-Pyrazolone type couplers have been heretofore employed as magenta color image forming couplers. Examples of newly developed pyrazoloazole type couplers are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,540,654 and 3,725,067.
These pyrazoloazole type couplers have excellent color reproducibility when they are employed as magenta color image forming couplers. However, it has been found that when they are used together with the DIR couplers as described above, the sharpness of color images formed is insufficient.